


Choosing Sides

by heartstrickledown



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-08
Updated: 2010-07-08
Packaged: 2017-10-10 11:16:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/99150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartstrickledown/pseuds/heartstrickledown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laurie's attempts at keeping a pet, coupled with her more violent urges and Sally's parenting not always going as planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choosing Sides

  
  
  
  


  
  
  
---  
  
  
Laurie carries a box of kittens home.

"Mom," she explains in tears when her mother hauls them into the back of the car, "they were gonna die, what was I _supposed_ to do?"

Sally sighs. "What you did, honey." Seeing the tears on Laurie's grungy cheeks, she delivers a kiss to her forehead and ruffles back her bangs. "I'm not mad at you," she assures her. She doesn't let Laurie come with her to the Humane Society, though, and Laurie spends the night crying in her room.

The next day they go to a ferret breeder.

By the next month, the ferret's found in the backyard, mangled by a cat.

*

Laurie has terrible luck with animals, but she means well and tries so hard to find a balance between viciousness and care that Sally can't deter her, except when it turns into talk of her becoming a veterinarian. Sally has higher aspirations for her than _that._

*

She loses three goldfish and a beta she calls HJ.

She learns how to disarm a man in under five seconds.

*

When Laurie is eleven, her mother's boyfriend, Dominic, takes her to an exotic pet store after he catches Laurie raptly watching a nature show on lizards. It's obvious what he's doing - connect to the girl to stay close to the mother - but Laurie likes him better than most of her mom's boyfriends anyway and he's promised to keep Sal under control when she finds out.

Laurie comes home with a tarantula. She names him Blake, which is a name she's overheard from her mother and likes for the blunt way it clicks out of her mouth. She spends an hour on her bed with him, letting him crawl over her stomach and arms, enamored at the feather-dust feel of his legs. He's gorgeous. When he eats, it's hideous, and her nose crinkles in disgust at the same time her lips split into a fascinated grin.

In the other room, she can hear her mother's attempts at arguing turn into attempts at lovemaking. The vanity's mirror taps the wall rhythmically.

"Well, Blake," Laurie says to her spider, stroking the solid balloon of his abdomen, "looks like we have to entertain ourselves a while. You like stories?" As it turns out, Blake is an avid listener but a terrible diplomat. Within the week he bites Sally, who screams about getting the damn thing out of her house.

Before she can take it back, Laurie carries Blake out to the back porch and sets him down. "Go," she snarls. The tarantula hunkers down, and it's his caution that kills him. "I said get." He doesn't. Laurie can feel hot anger coiling in her - anger at her mother for sticking her hand in Blake's face, at her mother's stupid boyfriend for assuming it could ever work, at herself for always, _always_ buying into the bullcrap everyone feeds her. Laurie hears the sliding glass door behind her open, sees her mother, a pale contrast to the red-faced anger from before, and the last spike is driven in.

Laurie lifts her foot and sets it down, the tracks of her tennis shoes biting at Blake's back. She stares at her mother, whose mouth is open, hand just over it. Blake scrabbles underneath her, panicking; she can feel him squirming through her shoe. She stomps down, breaks his body with a wet cracking sound. Her mother's face twists.

"There," she says, scraping a yellow line of guts across the pavement. "Blake's dead. Are you happy now?"

Blinded by the black energy pulsing in her stomach and chest, Laurie doesn't see her mother cover her heart. To her, there's no regret from Sally.

That night, she finds her mother crying in the den.

She doesn't question it.  



End file.
